Letter from Espargal: 5 of 2009

As good a place as any to start this letter is Wednesday morning which, like other mornings this week, dawned with the promise of rain. On examining the satellite pictures on the Portuguese weather site, I discerned a break in the clouds that promised us an hour or two of fair weather before the advancing showers reached us. Cheered by this prospect, we all piled into the car and drove down the hill to the starting point of our valley walk.

As we emerged from the car, we noticed that the skies overhead had turned sombre and threatening. Even so, we proceeded. We are all-weather walkers, after all, and it takes more than a dark cloud to scare us off. A few minutes into the jaunt, we were caught in a sharp shower. Jones shared her umbrella with me and the dogs. Prickles, declining to join the huddle, curled himself into a ball in the lee of a wall. The shower went away again.

Ten minutes further down the trail and a bolt of lightning lit the skies, followed by a clap of thunder and an explosion of cold, very wet, wind-driven rain. Briefly we sought the umbrella’s meagre protection under the branches of a very leaky tree. The storm merely mocked us. So, growing increasingly wet and cold, we slopped back down the track to the car. As we arrived home, the skies began to clear and there was even a burst of sunshine. Clearly my strategy was sound; just the timing was wrong.

MIST OVER ESPARGAL

However, this tempest was as nothing compared to the two inches of rain that squalled down on Saturday night. The storm had been widely forecast, together with warnings of rough seas and snow in the highlands. We awoke in the early hours to a wind howling like the banshee and hurling the plastic chairs around the upper patio. Then the heavens opened; water drummed against the windows and clattered off the roof. A steady drip from the study ceiling began to plop on to the upper bookshelf. (There must be a badly cemented tile on the apex of the roof.) Eventually, we fell asleep once again.

In the morning we found the rain-gauge overflowing with more than 50 mms of water. It was the first serious rain of the season – badly needed; the country’s reservoirs are low. We wondered what it had done to the Algibre river and took the dogs down to see. Well, well! We could hear the raging waters from afar. The surrounding fields had turned into a lake, studded with unhappy trees. Our sleepy little stream had swelled into a turbulent monster, a brown torrent bearing heaps of reeds and other detritus.

The small ford where Raymond had splashed across a few days before was engulfed in a surging, swirling tide. For safety’s sake I kept the dogs on leads. Other villagers gathered to behold the scene. Only once before, they said, had they witnessed the waters so high.

Afterwards I walked the 2 kms back up the hill with Zeferino, my 87 year old neighbour. He easily kept pace with me. His vigour is truly remarkable. He’s a sober citizen and a small, if fastidious eater. What’s most refreshing about him is his appetite for life. Every day brings a fresh mission with it, whether it’s to prune his trees, visit one of his plots or just to join his fellow villagers in conversation.

The old fellow can’t read or write but he gets along just fine nonetheless, with occasional help from his neighbours. We dropped him and his dog, Bobby, off at his house, along with the new green (Chinese) collar that we’ve just bought Bobby to replace the one he lost while galloping around with Raymond.

Like our neighbours we are in receipt of a new water bill, down from just on 100 euros to 25. It’s not often that I welcome bills but this one’s a beaut. For the past month we’ve been using water from our cisterna, which has been overflowing, rather than mains water. So the next bill should be much lower still.

BENAFIM BEYOND THE VINES

As frequently happens, the mains water supply has been playing up. Jones reported to me after going to visit neighbours that water was cascading down the hill from the concrete reservoir that supplies the village, and she asked me to let the authorities know. As it was lunchtime, when Portugal closes down, I had to wait an hour to get through. A little later we heard a van hurrying up the hill towards the reservoir. Two workmen scurried into the control room, scurried out again and shot off down the road. I can only think that the reservoir was being overfilled by a pump lower down. (And as I go to air, the same problem has cropped up again.)

VALLEY WALK

Midweek, Horacio the builder dropped in to assess a job he’s agreed to do for us, the erection of a fence around the back of the house. It’s not a big job but it entails digging lots of holes for fence posts, a labour from which I’ve excused myself on sciatic grounds. Horacio said his men were ready to get to work as soon as the rain stopped, which ought to be early next week. It will be a relief to have the fence in place, and to be able to let the dogs out in the knowledge that they can’t decamp into the bush whenever they’re bored.

Llewellyn phoned from the UK to say that the Sat-Nav I’d ordered from Amazon had arrived at his house in Leamington Spa. (Amazon won’t deliver most electronic equipment overseas because of the danger of fraud.) I looked for one down here but found the range limited and the cost higher, now that the euro has risen so much against the pound. After testing the model for me, Llewellyn was kind enough to make his way through the snow to the post office. I look forward to receiving it early next week.

NEIGHBOURS, OLLY & MARIE

Britain’s snowfall and the country’s resulting paralysis has been much in the news, closely followed by the fuss over (Maggie’s daughter) Carol Thatcher’s golliwog – a reference she made off-air at the BBC to a black tennis player, although I have no idea of the context. Whatever the case, it led to complaints of racist language by people who overheard the remark, which Ms Thatcher insists was made in jest. The Beeb reacted by dropping her from the programme, for which she reports. A huge fuss erupted - and continues in all the BBC blogs and discussion programmes.

BACK EXERCISES

We took ourselves one evening to see Frost-Nixon and enjoyed it although I was surprised to see that it had made the top 250 on the IMDB site. We thought Frank Langella superb as Nixon and Michael Sheen okay as Frost, although he came over as a bit of a wimp. I hadn’t realised that the film was based on a play inspired by the original interviews. It was quite disturbing, afterwards, to discover what liberties the playwright and producers had taken with history, the better to entertain us. They always do, of course, but we’d somehow expected the movie to be closer to the truth. Silly us!